h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm afraid that people are getting too complacent. They accept things occuring in their lives that, while they cannot be called major by any stretch, are unjustifiable and totally insulting. This is because people have learned that if they go with the herd, all will be well. Sure... You may have to alter your beliefs, the way you act or the things you say, but what the hell. Life is too short for a conflict. Op! It's some big bad people depriving you of your rights! Ah well. It would require work to fight for our freedoms, so lets accept it and ridicule those who don't, it'll be easier this way, because you don't have to think for yourself at all.

That's another problem with people today. The vast, vast, vast, and I would like to say vast again, but being at risk of being redundant, I'll skip it, majority of people today never THINK. Now, I don't mean think as in think, "Hey, whats on TV tomorrow?" But think as in get a big, I dunno, jug? jar? What the heck is this thing I'm staring in the face? I dunno. Big carrying container of hot beverages, full of coffee and sit on your roof at night and let your mind wander. I do it all the time. It's good to have another person who can think there so you can discuss what you're thinking about, but sometimes its better to not.
So try to think. It won't hurt you. And who knows? You may get to be good at it. Not as good as ME, of course, but good nonetheless.

Ain't it the truth... I totally agree...

Something else I've noticed, though, is that people are not only complacent about the things that matter... they totally make minidramas out of events that are totally unimportant... This friend of mine thinks its a tragedy when she runs out of hairspray or when her belly-button ring doesn't match her cell phone cover (the sad thing is I'm not being sarchastic about that last remark...she actually makes it a priority)... But at the same time, the majority of the population of the United States is more pissed off that our Basketball team didn't win against Spain or something, and could care less that the intelligence levels of our elementry school students came in at 80-something'th in the world, and are still drastically declining...

And when you do try to stand up for something worthy, you have all the easy-way-out people telling you to shut up and leave it alone, just so they don't have to deal with it...

"Help! Help! I'm Being Repressed!" - Monty Python

You know I had this jock tell me one time (and these are pretty much his exact words) "Its a waste of time to be smart... I'm an athlete because I want people to love me and I want to be rich and get a lot of girls and I'm going to be in the Pros someday... what do I need to be smart for? I have a sexy body and I can play ball... thats all that counts..."
I told him he was the most arrogant, egocentric, and blatantly moronic individual I'd ever met... He then told me to quit using big words.

What I "Fear" is that people nowadays aren't even capable of Thinking... they just keep getting dumber and more plastic... is there such a thing as Reverse Evolution?... I won't even begin to go into the epidemic of "Lack-of-Common-Sense" (LCS)- its a very serious disease with no known cure...

Blessings...
~The Gypsy~

Thanks, it's nice to see I have some sympathizers. I do have to disagree with you on one point, though. The North American school systems will never become an acceptable institution until some very dramatic changes are made. So dramatic that they would almost wipe out the entire system as we know it. Right now the system is just a repressive and depressing place to be, where individuality is squelched and punished, and those who conform and blindly do the bidding of people who have been placed above them are praised and rewarded, while the entire defense of the system is "success." How are you going to succeed in the world without your education? How will you make more money than such and such and be able to afford a trophy-wife/husband when you're old? It's all about money, while the people who are forced into the system have absolutely no say in the way they are treated. This makes me furious, because if such a thing were to happen to a registered voter, there would be a furor, and people would claim it was wrong and the person's rights were being violated. Oh, wait. I should change that. If a registered voter were ever to notice that such a thing was happening... because it is, in North America, anyway. The way our communities work is people conform, or are cast out. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I mean, if all you want to do is conform, conform your ass off. If it makes you happy.

Ok. There's more I wanted to say, but this is getting to be too long as it is, so I'm cutting myself off.

I agree and concur wholeheartedly. Especially regarding the state of the public school in the United States. Being a relatively recent graduate of said institution, I know firsthand. Today's schools are *entirely* about conformity. It would be "unfair" for schools to treat students as if some are in some way "better" than others. Everyone must be given the same opportunities, because otherwise, someone might be disenfranchised. What our school system (and most of our society) lacks is a fundamental understanding one fact: Equality does *not* mean being the SAME. Equality under the law deals with a persons worth as a person, which is inarguably the same for every person. However, every other aspect of a person is UNIQUE, and it's about time our schools began to recognize that fact. There are a lot of other problems with American schools, but the most basic, and most important, is the basic philosophy behind education today. Instead of encouraging students to do what they enjoy, our schools project the idea that it's impossible to have a fulfilling life without going to college first. I see this as a particular problem among those students whose natural abilities are in the creative and mechanical areas. Scores of these young adults go to college rather than to specialized career training, hate it, and end up in second-rate jobs that they continue to hate, rather than become the first-rate carpenters, mechanics, machinists, artists, chefs, or whatever else they might have wanted to do, because our schools and our society project an image of these jobs as being second-rate.

Wow. Didn't know I was going to write that much. Don't even know if any of it makes sense. Oh well.

Güthwinë on a Soapbox.

I totally agree with both of you about the school systems...

When I was talking about Schools in my earlier comments I was referring to America's priorities and how f****d up they are... (people were more upset that we lost a basketball game then they were about our school kids getting stupider and stupider) - There was a statistic that I read about it somewhere, but I don't remember where...

Speaking of being on a School System Soapbox... let me tell you what I just heard about a school in the neighboring county... They won't let the kids read the Harry Potter Books in school, and punish the children for having them, because they say it talks about Witchcraft....

First off, I'd like to know exactly whats wrong with Magick and Witchcraft... and then I want to know why the hell they're making it a crime for a child to use Creativity and Imagination... I mean, I know a bunch of children who wouldn't be picking up a book at all and reading if it weren't for Harry Potter (The kids in America are going crazy for it)... Finally the kids around here are reading instead of watching tv and playing video games, and now they want to go and take that away from them...

Blessings...
~The Gypsy~

I have to agree with both of you.

But:

Gypsy, you claimed that the school system should be happy that children are finally reading books. Well, if it wasn't run by hypocritical dinguses, (And I hope THEY don't moderate the word dingus) they would be. However, there are two barriers to the school system supporting the Harry Potter books. One is, as you said, the forceful application of the teachers beliefs of "right" and "wrong" onto hir students. So, when you get a truly "christian" teacher, you'll have problems. (Note to christians, the reasons I put "christian" in quotation marks are I was not referring to a normal christian, but rather the type that believes that reading anything other than the bible is a sin, and there are more of those types out there than I'd like to believe.)
The second, and more regular problem is this. Reading books at an early age leads to reading books at a later age that are cataclysmic to the thinking process. When a student thinks, there is a VERY, VERY, redundantly V_E_R_Y good chance that said student will form an opinion opposite or at least only tangential to the opinions held by the school workers. This is dangerous because once the thinking starts, the teachers are deprived of the ability to think for their students, which is a necessity in the world of school, and the ability to have others think for you exclusively is a necessity in the world we live in today.

Have you read Ayn Rand's "Anthem" (see, I was one of the fortunate children who were aloud to read, unlike the poor societal clone children of today) -- Anyway, Its a good book... you seem like the kind of person who would appreciate it... It has this whole topic of of Societal "Oneness" (No "I"... Only "We")...

Boy, If I were a teacher (I would probably be fired the first week, or burned at the stake)I would make it a priority to get kids to read Anything... it wouldn't matter if it were Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Druidic, Athiest, whatever... As a matter of fact, I would probably teach Eclecticism and Free Thinking... and definately encourage creativity and imagination...

"Imagination is the Most Potent of all Magick." -- Flight of Dragons
(Oh, but thats why they won't let them read Harry Potter...)

I suppose being an idealist is getting me nowhere.

Blessings...
~The Gypsy~

I wholeheartedly agree with all of you! When my son Steve was in elementary school one of his teachers actually told him he was stupid because he couldn't read, and yelled at my wife and I because we were trying to teach him to sound words out. She (the teacher) said that he had (mind you HAD) to learn sight words. Steve does have a reading problem, he's a auditory learner, and probably has a bigger vocabulary than some of those other kids who did learn sight words, but I'm sure he would read better than he does today if this teacher had'nt insisted that there was ONLY ONE way to learn. Down with narrow minds everywhere, but especially in our school systems!!!! (Hope at least some of that ranting makes sense!)
RtJ

Someone should tell your son's teacher that her method of teaching is a bunch of Bull S**t...

I work at a daycare center when I'm out of school for Christmas and the summer, and I've compared the children who have learned to read by just memorizing the words and the ones who learned Phonix and how to sound words out... the ones who sound the words out are, without a doubt, the superior readers... when they come to a word they don't know, they work on it and figure it out for themselves (when you figure out something for yourself you learn and remember it better)... the ones who have just "Memorized" a bunch of words always fumble and get confused and give up when they can't figure a word out... They also tend to have very narrow vocabularies and are less likely to go look up the meanings of words they don't know...

And any teacher that tells a child that they're "Stupid" should be fired immediately... My little brother was treated the same way... He was labled with Borderling ADHD (which he does not have, and which I belive to be the biggest Psychological Scapegoat ever)... and he was stigmatized throughout elementary school because of it... he was always set in the back of the room and ignored, and he's suffered scholastically and emotionally because of it... When children are told that they are "Stupid," they actually start to belive it (and out of all the children I've met, I've never met one that was "Stupid")... and the part that gets me is that he is in no way "Stupid"... He is very bright, but he hasn't been given the opportunity to learn what he should...

I applaud you for trying to teach your son to sound out words even when his teacher (obviously out of her mind) was dead-set against it... Its never too late to continue helping him to improve his reading and phonix skills. You, as a parent, have the right to teach your children the way you feel is best, no matter what any school official says.

Blessings...
~The Gypsy~

Well, we did home-school him for a while. He's old enough now to do his own thinking and he's not above telling a teacher when he thinks they are wrong. He's even convinced more than one teacher to see things his way when he was sure they were wrong. and when he wants to know something badly enough he knows how to find out, even without a teachers help. Egad. heresey! He thinks for himself and finds things out for himself!!

You can't really blame the teachers, though. For some strange reason people believe it's only the younger generations who fall victim to society's foibles. These teachers were told that this was the only way that their students should learn to read, and these adults, perfectly conditioned by their time in schools of their own, latched onto the idea as veritous immediately, only because the school board told them to. It's this wierd pack-mentality that's been taken to extremes by the human population, and whats worse, the alpha animals in this pack aren't the most intelligent, clear thinking, most decisive (and making good decisions too) people, but rather, the people who control the movement of little green pieces of paper, or, if you live in Canada like me, little, multicoloured pieces of paper.
The more paper you have, the more power you have. Woe to those who oppose the owner of a pulp mill. Or is it the colour of the paper that matters? The little numbers written on the bottoms? The pictures of royalty, leaders of the state? What makes this paper so damn important? Let me tell you. The institution that controls the paper says the paper is important, and since they have so much of this magical papyrus, (I know it isn't actually papyrus, I got tired of saying paper.) we accept their words as true. We say, "Look at all that paper! They say it's important, the most important thing in the world, and look at all they have! I'm going to dedicate my life to the pursuit of this paper!" and they sure as hell do.
Hold on.
*pops some garlic in his mouth and continues to rant in your general direction*
No, forget it. Best to stop now.

If the economy ever goes down the tubes, I'd like to see what good those little pieces of paper are going to do. The people with so much of them would look real funny tring to eat them!!!

*Paper is made out of Cotton*

I do have to say, on the subject of teachers, that I have known some exceptional ones (few and far between)... but I have also known some absolutely wretched ones...

The Wretched ones p**s us off, but we don't seem to appreciate the Exceptional ones enough...

Have you ever seen "Dead Poet's Society"... We need more teachers like Mr. Keating (Robin Williams)... and I know they're out there or they wouldn't be writing movies about them...

Blessings...
~The Gypsy~

Amen to that, Gypsy.

Exceptional teachers are the greatest thing in the world. I was lucky enough to attend a high school where I was able to study under several teachers that I would not hesitate to call "exceptional". In particular, the English department was absolutely unbelievable. Probably why I'm looking to be an English teacher when I get done with school....

As far as the reading thing goes, I agree that the methods need to be changed. I understand that phonics is not how a learned reader reads. Not many readers read by "sounding out" every word. But phonics is how we *LEARN* to read. Only later can we move on to reading by sight, and even then, we still "sound out" words that we don't know. I can't even imagine trying to learn by sight, having skipped the first step. I'm glad I learned to read at such a "backward" school.

Güthwinë.

I'm glad that my mother cared enough about my sister and myself that she read to us every day! I was reading before I ever went to school, and I still remember some of the stories that Mom read to us (I'm 51 years old!).

I was one of the lucky ones, too... Both my parents read to me...
My mother said she read to me in the hospital when I was born, and my father read me really advanced books at a young age... When I was 5 he read me "Siddhartha," "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," "The Hobbit," "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," among others... and that was only when I was 5... All of those books are still some of my favorites and I've read them all over and over... and I plan on reading them to my children someday...
He really gave me a passion for Literature and so many kids today lack that.

Blessings...
~The Gypsy~

Some of the stories that my mon read to me have long since gone out of print and I don't know where you would find them anymore. Besides, I remember them as being magical and utterly fantastical, and would hate to lose any of that memory by reading them now and finding that they weren't as I remembered. I may, in body, be an 'old fart', but I'm just a little kid at heart! And I hope I NEVER grow up!!!

Oh, and by the way, Right now I'm doing some research reading on the Iroquois indians of N.Y. State, which I hope to turn into a University of Life project eventually.

Well, I actually have to disagree with you people there. Reading isn't important, by any stretch. In my opinion, at least. It's a skill, and while it does make life easier and more entertaining, it isn't something that you should ever believe important. Being able to cipher symbols imprinted on a piece of paper isn't a thing that is necessary to the process of thinking, and here is some of the complacency I've been speaking of, please, PLEASE don't take this as offensive, this is an expression of my opinions, here goes. You have all been told at an early age that the ability to read was important. Constantly, you have had that belief re-affirmed by your teachers and, now, by a hypocritical media that wants to show how much it cares. Never ONCE did you question the veracity of their statements. Reading is a nice skill, but it's only another skill. If Socrates could not read, and had to dictate his thoughts to someone, then, where is the loss? If he could not read, and we never heard of him, again, where is the loss? We would have no knowledge of his existence.
I, personally, believe that the ability to communicate clearly and to think with accuracy is far more important and preferable to being able to read.

More than half of the things I know that I consider important I learned from books.Self taught. Without the ability to read I would be stuck with only the things that "they" taught me! I come from a rather sparsely populated area, (read dairy farm country)books expand my world, without them I wouldn't know about a lot of places. For me reading is very important, and not just as entertainment or escapeism either!!!